Jane Goodall, page 15
Museum work, anthropology, and archaeology enabled Louis to combine those two disparate worlds. He learned specimen collection and bird classification from Arthur Loveridge, the first curator of Nairobi’s natural history museum, who periodically stayed at the Kabete mission while on collecting expeditions; and he was inspired to become an archaeologist after receiving as a gift H. N. Hall’s Days Before History, a children’s adventure book set in prehistoric Britain and based on the experiences of a youthful hero named Tig. The book’s illustrations included drawings of flint weapons and tools that reminded the young Louis of the pieces of glassy stone he regularly stumbled across in recently dug or washed-out areas. He began collecting fragments of obsidian, and when he finally, with trepidation, showed his collection to Loveridge, the curator confirmed that some of the specimens were indeed Stone Age implements. “Once I had received this assurance that my ‘bits of black stone,’ as my father called them, were really things that had been made by Stone Age man, I started collecting with doubled keenness,” he wrote. And by the time he turned thirteen, Louis had set upon his life’s course: “I firmly made up my mind that I would go on until we knew all about the Stone Age” in East Africa.
In 1919 the family returned for a couple of years to England. Louis, now sixteen years old, entered a public school, Weymouth, in Dorset. He found it hard to make friends, however. The restrictions seemed absurd, and nearly all the other students appeared, as he once wrote, “appallingly childish.” And yet, although he had never written an essay, never attended a theater, and proved embarrassingly bad at cricket, he was determined to attend his father’s university, Cambridge. The Weymouth headmaster said he ought to settle for a job in a bank, but Louis proposed entering on a course of studies that would include modern languages and anthropology/archaeology. Modern languages required two foreign languages. Louis knew “only French” and so was at first discouraged, until he observed that nothing in university regulations implied that the two foreign languages should be European. He submitted Kikuyu as his second modern language. When Cambridge administrators protested that Kikuyu lacked writing or literature, Louis countered that the Bible had been translated into Kikuyu—by his father. When it became apparent that no one at Cambridge was capable of teaching him the formal niceties of Kikuyu, Louis settled on a tutor who agreed to be taught the language—by Louis. When university officials finally tried to locate experts to examine him in his chosen language, they were given a list of two top Kikuyu experts in Britain—one of whom was the examinee.
At Cambridge, Louis was the first undergraduate to show up on the tennis courts wearing shorts—and also the first to be thrown off the courts for “indecency.” He was an eccentric and an iconoclast, in short, ultimately saved from the scorn ordinarily directed at social outsiders by his physical vigor, handsome features, and exceptional intellect. He distinguished himself at university, but not before taking a year off to manage, as second in charge, a difficult fossil-hunting expedition into southeastern Tanganyika. He gave his first public lecture to an audience of one thousand at Cambridge University’s Guildhall while still an undergraduate, twenty-one years old; went on to finish his studies with the highest possible honors (a double first); and in the summer of 1926, when he was twenty-three, returned to East Africa as the head of an archaeological expedition. During the next four decades, Leakey’s diggings and pluckings of ancient artifacts and fossilized skulls and bones—his life’s work—ultimately revolutionized paleoanthropology and helped shape the scientific world’s vision of human evolution as a tree with roots in the garden of Africa.
When Jane met Louis Leakey, in May 1957, he was an eminent scientist (Ph.D. from Cambridge, honorary D.Sc. from Oxford, full-time curator of the Coryndon Museum, recently elected president of the third Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, author of eight books, and so on), though not yet the celebrity he would become. His brown hair had turned white, his trimmed mustache was gray, and he had lately begun to put on weight. He had also developed his longtime habit of dressing in one-piece khaki coveralls with missing buttons, overloaded pockets, and flapping knees. His teeth were bad, and he tended to stink, perhaps as a consequence of infrequent bathing and frequent cheroot smoking. As always, he spoke enthusiastically and endlessly with a “soft voice” and “sing-song inflections” (in the words of his biographer Sonia Cole), while his laugh was “quiet and staccato, like a bronchitic gasping for breath.”
Leakey was by then very well known among white Kenyans, and given Jane’s interests, perhaps it was inevitable that the two would eventually meet. According to Jane’s later account, one day that May someone told her that “if you are interested in animals, you must meet Louis Leakey.” In a letter to the family, Jane declared that “Clo told me about him.” Since Clo had met Dr. Leakey once or twice, she promised to introduce Jane to him, but Jane, impatient perhaps, telephoned the museum on her own. To a voice on the other end of the line, she said, “I’d like to make an appointment to meet Dr. Leakey.” The voice responded, “I’m Dr. Leakey. What do you want?”
Louis Leakey invited her to visit the museum at ten o’clock on Friday morning, May 24, which happened to be a bank holiday in Nairobi, so Jane had the day free. And for the “whole morning,” as she soon wrote home with boiling excitement, the great man guided her around the museum, “pointing out why one species of antelope had its head set on a particular angle, or one type of pig had horny developments in one place and another sort in another.” He showed Jane the museum’s large collection of snakes, about which she was “naturally very interested.” He told her about his experiments on lungfish that demonstrated their astonishing tolerance for drought. (“These remarkable creatures have been proved [by Leakey] able to remain in their dried mud holes without a drop of water or a bit to eat for—you just couldn’t guess—3 whole years!!!!! They were still alive, but very weak, and Dr. Leakey decided it wasn’t fair to make them survive longer.”) Louis Leakey seems to have talked almost nonstop that morning, and he told Jane “so many fascinating things, that it would take me pages and pages,” she declared, to write them down.
After that two-hour tour, they sat down for coffee. Louis asked Jane to work as his secretary starting in September, since his previous one had left to watch gorillas. He also asked, “Can you ride?”
Jane said she loved to ride horses.
He looked at her closely and asked, “Are you good with dogs?”
Jane responded very positively.
“Would you be interested in living at my house while my wife and I are away, exercising the horses and seeing that all the animals are all right?” The animals included, he said, horses, dogs, bush babies, a tree hyrax, a python, and a garden full of other snakes; and the offer, as Jane wrote home, “absolutely took my breath away.” Naturally, Louis added, he would first have to discuss the idea with his wife, Mary.
Meanwhile, Jane agreed to gather spiders for the museum, since the resident entomologist, Robert Carcasson, was “not frightfully keen on them” himself; and so after work the following Monday, she returned to meet with Carcasson, talk about spider collecting, and be given the necessary equipment. Louis happened to be staying late at the museum that day, and he took the opportunity to show Jane another two hours’ worth of specimens, reaffirming that he wanted her to become his secretary in September. (“He says he doesn’t care about my shorthand and typing—only spelling!!!! Which, as I told him, is a positive HOOT! Whereat he informed me that he couldn’t spell either.”) Jane learned, as she wrote home, a “terrific amount” that time, and she left with spider-collecting jars and preserving fluid as well as copies of two books Louis had written.
The spider collecting did not get very far. Jane dutifully trapped a few, but after the first two she found she could not bear to kill them.
Louis met Jane at the museum again the following Friday, and this time he took her out in his Land Rover to Nairobi National Park and, according to a June 6 letter home, “put me through my paces,” asking her to identify, in the drizzle-dimmed late-afternoon light, the animals they were seeing: Thomson’s gazelle, Grant’s gazelle, wildebeest, impala, dik-dik, and so on. They also stopped at the chief game warden’s house to see his eight-month-old lion, an orphan named Prince, who turned out to be a “really lovely creature” and “absolutely gigantic, particularly the size of his paws,” stretched out in front of the fire, lazy and serene like a well-fed housecat.
The house-sitting offer never quite materialized, but the promise of a secretarial job was repeated and confirmed. One day in June, while Jane was again visiting the museum, Louis declared that he ought to give her an official shorthand test, and so he invented a sample letter about a fossil tooth from some antique species, spelling out the species’ Latinate name. Afterward he said, “Well, you got that down all right, didn’t you?” She said yes, and that was the end of the shorthand test. Then he asked if he ought also to give her a spelling test. Jane smiled and said that if her future work for him depended on a spelling test, then perhaps he should not. He smiled back and did not give the test.
Finally, having covered the matter of employment for September, Louis “thought deeply” and then very boldly “proposed a glorious scheme” for August. He and Mary were planning an archaeological expedition to Oldu-vai Gorge in Tanganyika, and if it were possible to add enough water and food for another person, would Jane like to come along? As she wrote home a few days later (on June 20), “If—& a big IF—they can take enough water & food for one extra, they will take me!! IF, IF, IF. But that fact remains that he is trying hard to work it for me, & if I go it will be miles from anywhere in lion & rhino country, working very hard at digging up bones, very rough conditions—& absolute heaven.” Louis also loaned her some chapters of the unpublished manuscript for his study on the Kikuyu to read, which was, she recognized, “an honour.”
On Friday afternoon, June 28, Louis telephoned Jane at work to announce that he intended to come over and pick her up after she was done for the day to pass on some more chapters of his book. At 4:30 that afternoon he appeared in his enormous safari truck, gave her three more manuscript chapters, and asked if she still wanted to go on the expedition to Olduvai. Jane was eager to go, and so Louis said he would talk to his wife that evening. If she vetoed the idea, that would be the end of it. But if she thought it might be possible, then Jane would have to meet Mary on Sunday morning at a Langata Pony Club “drag hunt” (horses following hounds following a dragged scent trail rather than a live animal).
Langata was the Nairobi suburb where the Leakeys lived, and during the ten- or twelve-mile drive out there that Sunday morning, Louis cautioned Jane about Mary. He would have to be careful not to call Jane by her first name in front of his wife, he explained, since Mary would consider such a thing “dreadfully familiar.” Indeed, they had had a terrific battle over his previous secretary, because Mary thought she had been flirting with Louis. “She takes violent dislikes or likes to people for no reason at all,” Louis concluded, and so Jane (as she wrote home) “began to be petrified of meeting Mary.”
The problem with Mary was more complicated than Louis was letting on. Although he and his wife worked superbly together as a professional team, partners in the great Leakey family enterprise of fossil-hunting and paleoanthropology, they were much less successful in their personal partnership. Louis’s extroversion, charm, and great vigor happened to combine with a quiet emotional neediness and even, one can imagine, an abiding loneliness. “Woman came to him like moths to a flame,” one observer has noted. “And he enjoyed it; he was a real human that way.” Louis Leakey’s several affairs had included a serious and recent one with his previous secretary, who, in the assessment of his son Richard, nearly became “the third Mrs. Leakey.”
In 1954, while Louis was in London at the British Museum studying a collection of pig fossils, he began the affair with the young and attractive Rosalie Osborn, who moved to Kenya in the summer of 1955 to become his secretary at the museum. Mary had tolerated Louis’s previous affairs, but this one was much more serious. Mary soon began consoling herself with alcohol, which Louis found intolerable, and by the end of that year their house at Langata was the scene of bitter and noisy quarrels. The Leakeys’ three sons, Jonathan, Richard, and Philip, each responded differently to the familial chaos. Richard, the middle son, almost eleven years old at the time, appeared to be the most affected. When his parents fought, Richard would confront them, screaming, “For heaven’s sake, stop this! Please don’t shout at each other!” And when Louis began threatening to leave, his young son pleaded, “Daddy, please don’t leave me. Don’t go, Daddy.”
Then Richard fell off a horse and suffered a severe concussion, from which he recovered slowly. Louis was filled with remorse and became concerned about how the family stress was affecting the boy and how Richard would cope with a divorce. In the end Louis ended the affair with Rosalie, who continued to work at the museum until February 1956, whereupon, as Louis had arranged, she went on a fossil-hunting and fish-collecting trip to Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria. A few months later she began a preliminary attempt to study mountain gorillas in Uganda. But with only minimal results after four months on the gorilla front, Rosalie returned to England at the beginning of 1957, worked at the British Museum for a time, and finally enrolled as an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge University, to study zoology.
Jane was only a month younger than her secretarial predecessor, and Louis may have been hoping, perhaps in spite of his better impulses, that she would turn out to be another Rosalie. Jane, who was impressed by and already tremendously fond of Louis, would have been shocked and upset to understand the complex dynamics of the situation she was moving into, and it was probably best she did not.
They stopped at a village shop to buy soft drinks for the Pony Club and then proceeded to the Leakey house, where they met five big dalmations and a pair of wild hyraxes, then picked up Richard (then twelve) and Philip (just eight years old, sometimes known as Peanut). Accompanied by the two boys, Louis and Jane drove on to the Pony Club event, where Jane met Mary: “a small, lean woman, with blackened teeth, a perpetual cigarette, & short wavy hair,” who seemed “a little distant” on that first introduction. Jane was next introduced to a nineteen-year-old friend of the Leakey family’s, Gillian Trace, who would be going on the expedition to Olduvai.
There was no extra horse for Jane, so she rode along with Louis as he followed the progress of the drag hunt in his Land Rover, which was “wonderful fun,” since he was so skilled at handling that seemingly indestructible vehicle. “The sun shone—& I was so happy,” she wrote home.
When they got back to the Pony Club meet, Mary encouraged Jane to ride a “wicked little pony” named Shandy, who was notoriously skittish and tended to walk backward when mounted. No one told Jane about Shandy’s reverse inclinations, and when she did mount the horse, Shandy felt, as Jane now recalls, “very odd to me as she went back.” Everyone was laughing at the sight, but Jane got off and said she thought the horse was in pain. She removed the saddle and discovered “a big pink saddle sore.” Perhaps it was that event, more than anything, that gave Mary a positive first impression. They found a sheepskin or something comparable to put on the horse, and while Louis and Mary drove back to the house with Philip, Jane rode crosscountry with the two older Leakey sons, Jonny and Richard, and “a very nice girl” around fourteen years old. Jonny was then sixteen and, as Jane put it, “dead nuts on snakes.” On the ride back, in between the moments when Jonny would leap off his horse to gather up frogs to feed his snakes, he and Jane “talked snake.” Richard distracted himself by chasing butterflies.
Back at the house, they found that Louis and Mary had already started eating lunch. Louis asked Jane if she was hungry, and she replied, “Fairly.” Mary declared, “That means ‘starving,’ only she’s well brought up.” Jane, very alert to any signals of favor or disfavor emanating from Mary, thought that comment was a “good sign.”
After lunch, the visitor was shown the family fish, swimming around inside nineteen different tanks in the house. Then Jonny hauled out his python: twelve feet long and ill-tempered enough to bite the boy’s arm. Undeterred, he proceeded to show off his four-foot-long Jackson’s tree snake, interesting though not poisonous, followed by an equally interesting and perfectly deadly boomslang. Next they went outdoors to look at the snake garden. Jonny, barefoot, stepped around his slithering collection of poisonous night adders and puff adders. He was “not a polite child,” Jane concluded, and “indeed, none of them are.” The boys were all “treated rather as grown ups and a little spoilt.”
While they were being entertained by barefoot Jonny and his poisonous snakes, a phone call interrupted with the urgent message that a leopard had just killed a neighbor’s Irish wolfhound. Louis was asked to come over and set a trap; a leopard might prove useful at Tsavo National Park just then, because overenthusiastic hunters had recently wiped out most of the predators controlling baboon and wild pig populations. So it was back into the Land Rover once again, with Louis and the two younger boys, both wielding butterfly nets, off to borrow a leopard trap—a wood-and-wire-mesh contraption around eight feet long and nearly five feet high—and transport it to the aggrieved neighbor with the dead Irish wolfhound. That neighbor was “an old boy with heart trouble,” Jane noted, who had a “beefy” son-in-law. The old boy, the beefy son-in-law, Louis, Jane, and six African employees on the farm unloaded the trap and began hauling it over rocks and streams, through thorn thickets and dense woodland, following the trail of the leopard and the dead dog he had recently dragged away.
It was very hot, and the undergrowth soon turned resistant, so they put down the trap and waited. Then Louis went off to see where the trail led and consider how best to proceed. Next the six Africans left, following the same trail. Finally Jane and the old boy and the beefy son-in-law began following cautiously behind. Suddenly they heard a great ruckus. Catching up at last, they learned that the Africans had just sighted the leopard trying to haul his kill into a tree. The leopard had fled, dropping the Irish wolfhound—who now lay there on the ground, enormous and “really ghastly” to contemplate, with “all its guts hanging out & two holes in his throat where the leopard must have killed him.”
